The Way Disabled People Love Each Other: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha With Aurielle Marie

From the venue:

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha with Aurielle Marie

This event takes place in person at Charis and on Zoom. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance. Click here to register to attend virtually. Please read the in-person event guidelines at the bottom of this page to be sure you can participate in the event. Charis welcomes Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in celebration of The Way Disabled People Love Each Other, a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. Leah will be joined by Aurielle Marie for this event! 
The latest poetry collection by the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled. 
Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost cherished friends and comrades and met their estranged parents' end of life.
The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled QTBIPOC ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It's a road map for survivors looking for something that's neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale--not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.
This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.
About the Author LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA (they/them) is a disabled writer, disability and transformative justice cultural worker and notorious hot bitch of Burgher and Tamil Sri Lankan, Irish and Ukrainian/Galician/Roma ascent. They are the author or co-editor of eleven books, including The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs; Beyond Survival: Stories and Strategies from the Transformative Justice Movement (co-edited with Ejeris Dixon); Tonguebreaker; and Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. A Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, connecting and building power by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers, and the Stacey Park Milbern Liberation Art Residency, North America’s only writers’ residency by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. Raised in Worcester, MA, with roots in Toronto, Seattle and Oakland, they currently live in Lenapehoking/ Philadelphia. They are Jackie and Anna’s grandfemme, a non-binary femme on the stoop, a survivor and grown-up runaway making home and family. They are powered by hyperfocus, the silence, the cackle and the couch. Follow them at brownstargirl.org and their Substack, Postcards from the End of the World (llps.substack.com).
About Aurielle Marie
Award-winning poet, essayist, and cultural strategist Aurielle Marie (they/she) is a Black queer storyteller, political organizer, and child of the Deep South by way of Atlanta. They earned their Bachelor’s in Social Justice Strategy and Hip-Hop Theory from Evergreen State College. Aurielle’s poetry debut, Gumbo Ya Ya, is the recipient of both the 2020 Cave Canem Prize and the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, and is out now with the University of Pittsburgh Press. In 2022, they were chosen as Georgia Author of the Year for poetry following the debut of Gumbo Ya Ya. Aurielle is an Out Magazine Out100 Honoree. She currently lives and writes in Atlanta, Georgia with her wife, Zoë and her dog, Lil’ Baldwin.
The event is free and open to all people, but we encourage and appreciate a donation of $5-20 in support of the work of Charis Circle, our programming non-profit. Donate via our website: www.chariscircle.org/donate or in person at the event.
Accessibility

There will be ASL interpretation.
There will be CART captioning for virtual attendees.
All attendees must wear a KN94 face mask (or higher) during the event. Masks will be available.
Charis Books is a fully wheelchair accessible space with on site van accessible parking, two ramps, and additional overflow accessible parking nearby.
Additional accessibility information can be found on the Accessibility page of our website.
If you have accessibility needs that are not mentioned above - please don't hesitate to reach out to please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.

In-person event guidelines:

All attendees must wear a face mask during the event.
We will begin seating people at 7:00 PM ET.
This event will be live-streamed via Zoom. Click here to register to attend virtually.
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines, please contact info@charisbooksandmore.com or call the store at 404-524-0304.
By attending our event, whether in person or virtually, you agree to our Code of Conduct: Our event seeks to provide a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, religion (or lack thereof), class, or technology choices. We do not tolerate harassment in any form. Unsolicited sexual language and imagery are not appropriate. Anyone violating these rules will be expelled from this event and all future events at the discretion of the organizers. Please report all harassment to Charis staff immediately or email info@chariscircle.org.

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